


What Difference is There Between Us, Save a Restless Dream?

by lonewytch



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Luna University, Melody Pond - Freeform, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond, Romance, touch telepthy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-29
Updated: 2012-02-29
Packaged: 2017-11-01 17:58:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/359657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonewytch/pseuds/lonewytch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At Luna University, River settles into her new life. She fights against the ghost of Melody Pond which threatens to consume her. When the Doctor comes to call for the first time, River is afraid Melody will rise up again and try to take his life. But the Doctor shows her what she can be, what she will become if she can only trust herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Difference is There Between Us, Save a Restless Dream?

It’s not exactly a feeling of loneliness that accompanies her through her first months at Luna University. Loneliness is a thing she knows the shape of intimately already, its grey dips and folds have cradled most of her life so far. But this feels different. Rather, she feels half formed, insubstantial. The grounding weight of her future path presses against her. She feels sometimes like it will fall right through her, she will disperse like smoke, and all there will be left is a woman raised on nightmares, holding a gun to some-one's head. 

 

The weight of who she must become, in his eyes, vies with her fingers that tingle and itch to pull at a trigger.

Everything is unfamiliar at the University. New and strange. She meets it with her usual mask of confidence. The place where the world sees her thinks it touches amazing River Song. Only she knows how deep and dark the currents are inside. She looks down into herself and she sees monsters under the surface, waiting to break the thin skin that separates Melody from River. 

She wants to run, and she wants to do it hard and fast, out into the blackness. She wants to hurl herself into the stars and rip across the universe, tearing at the sky, to ease this pressing urge to kill. She has scattered memories, and those memories are made up of monsters she cannot see, a white suit that bites at her skin, and poisoned kisses. She hates and hates and hates it. 

But she also loves. She loves a man, and she loves a strange blue box that tumbles through time and weaves in and out galaxies and nebulae. She loves, and it’s golden under her skin; she remembers it shining under her fingers and on her breath. 

Love. 

The word is important. 

She’s looking for a good man. 

~

There are things that ease her itching fingers and restless feet. 

The college buildings, their warm stone and their archaic structures, so incongruous against the splash of the Milky Way above; she loves those. 

The stone, quarried from planet Earth and transported thousands of miles away from its home planet is more grounding than plastics or metals. At first she feels sympathy for that stone, dragged up out of the Earth and displaced across space in order to provide the structure that holds the life of the university. But she soon discovers that, to her, the building feels as if it has sunk roots down into this little grey moon. It feels at home here. Stone meets stone across thousands of miles and recognises its own, perhaps. 

She runs her hands along the walls, feels the roughness against her fingers, and examines the carved gargoyles and green men placed at every corner. They make her smile. The architects have done their best to create a sense of history and it has worked. Intricate foliate carvings stretch over every doorway, huge walls enclose halls and corridors, arched cloisters echo with the feet of students and enclose courtyards filled with grass and trees . 

There is a dome that arcs high above, enclosing the whole University. It stretches wide and high; it covers and protects its denizens from the breathless vacuum and the cold of space. A viewing platform circles the circumference, dotted with benches; a place where you can sit and think or else press your face to the glass and look out across the wild and lonely dust plains of Luna. 

The all encompassing dome stirs up some deep memories in River...memories she can’t quite place... the citadel against sky which blazes orange, like fires, plains of red grass..... and she dreams often of a high roof of glass cupping her safe beneath it. But instead of the shining blue-green of Earth, two blazing suns and a blood red moon track their way across the sky. 

~

When he first comes to visit her it’s unexpected...and it’s not unwanted. She can’t tell herself she hasn’t daydreamed of this as she has walked the long and lonely circumference of the University dome,  looking out onto the pitted grey and the dry seas of Luna. She can’t say she hasn’t yearned for it on the quiet nights when her nightmares wake her and the brightness of Earth hanging there in the sky is her only companion.  Only she isn’t sure she’s ready yet. She doesn’t trust herself; doesn’t trust her hands not to reach for a weapon - anything that could be a weapon - automatically. She doesn’t trust them not to slap and slice at his skin, not to grasp and strangle. Despite the walls she’s built she’s not sure she has been able to wish Melody far enough away that she can’t crumble them. 

She’s leaving a lecture, walking fast amongst the spill of students out of a thick wooden door and onto cold stone. Books and notepad are tucked into her hands, her fingers curled around them tightly, pressing them to her chest; her mind is filled with the complicated names of ancient temples and shrines. She leaves the deep shadows of one of the cloisters and strides out onto the springy grass of a large garden, escaping the slapping sound of rushing feet on blue-grey slabs of stone. She’s meaning to go and sit on a bench she likes, hidden under shadow of an ancient weeping willow tree with leaves and branches that trail and reach all the way down to touch the grass. Some weeping willows die when they collapse under their own weight, and she thinks that’s apt. There’s a world of shifting greens under there, shafts of sunlight not quite piercing through the sinuous branches and leaves, making a shadowed little hollow that she’s never seen anyone else sitting within.

She’s part way across the grass and isn’t looking where she’s going. Instead she’s watching the ground as it rushes by under her and thinking about kicking her shoes off and burying her toes into the soft grass, when she suddenly runs into someone. The slamming impact of her body against another sends alarm bells firing through her nervous system, and she’s suddenly tense, muscles bunched, ready to fight as her books drop haphazardly to the ground. 

When she looks up and sees it’s him, it hits her like a meteorite. The breath, not knocked out of her by the collision, is suddenly pulled out of her lungs by the impact of his eyes on her, like she’s broken through the glass of the dome and been cast spinning out into the vacuum. Adrenaline, already pulsing through her from the hard collision, doubles then doubles again; her fingers twitch and automatically reach for the gun at her hip which isn’t there. 

 

“Hello.” He smiles at her and his eyes are the shifting green of the willow and the brown of its gnarled and knotted bark. He smiles at her and the books lie scattered across the grass while the voices of students echo out from the stone. He smiles at her and she cannot move. 

“Doctor.” She forces the word out through a jaw that’s clenched too tight ,as if it doesn’t want any sound, any word, any sign to escape and give him the upper hand. It takes breath that she can’t spare right now, where has all of it gone? She knows her voice is harsh because it rattles and grates on her frayed nerves. He looks at her for a beat, eyebrows raised, a smile still quirking his lips, and then he’s bending to gather up her books and her notepad from the grass. His back is to her. How he must trust her. 

 

 

But the grass is empty, save for her and him, and she realises that the voice is rising out of her own memory, dredged up from the deeps like some rusting shipwreck and echoing back into her ears, harsh like metal. She swallows, and all of a sudden the signals firing through her body, filling her belly with a scraping ache, pumping blood to her muscles, are telling her to run, run run. 

So she stays. 

He’s standing up now, clutching her books to his chest, mirroring her posture just moments ago. She’s frozen in place, rooted into the ground, like her feet have sunk down through the thin white roots and into the soil, and then onwards into the still grey rock of the moon . He nods his head over towards the willow. 

“Shall we?” 

She nods woodenly and forces herself to walk next to  him, bringing tight control into every muscle fibre, and matching him pace for pace, as they head towards the sprawling tree. He holds the trailing branches aside for her, revealing the sleeping green world behind them. She moves through them, glancing at him as she passes, noticing the way he is still watching her that half smile upon his lips. She sits on the bench and he lets the green veil fall and then close, sealing them in amongst leaves and long pliant branches. He walks over, then sits close next to her - so close that their legs are almost touching, just a slice of space in-between them, the feel of him almost, but not quite, pressing against her. He puts the books down next to him, then relaxes back with a sigh, stretching long legs out, heels resting on the grass. She breathes slowly, deeply now, willing air back into her body, focusing on the rush of air through her mouth and into her lungs and back out again. 

“How are you?” 

His voice is low, quiet. A bird is singing out a series of cheeps and trills in the tree above them. 

“I’m...I’m fine.” There is no harshness to her voice now, just a tremble that makes her furious with herself. He turns, looks at her knowingly. Half of her wants to slap the knowing look from his face, but now half of her wants desperately to just kiss and kiss him. 

His voice is still soft, musical. “You’re wondering how i can trust you. How i can show you my back, walk next to you without a thought. You’re wondering how i can sit this close to you.” 

“Yes.” She doesn’t dissemble. There’s no point. This is the Doctor and she knows he will have read her accurately enough by now. Part of her starts to curse at herself for having let her training lapse, but she squashes it, pushes it down firmly to where it belongs. 

“Because i know you won’t hurt me.” There’s surety in his voice and in his steady gaze, not a whisper of doubt and she’s suddenly furious with him and pulls her eyes away from him. 

“How the hell  can you know that? I’m not ready, I....” She’s furious with him for coming here unexpectedly, unannounced, just as she has found herself a sense of calm deeper than any she’s know before, just as she has begun to feel grounded. She has immersed herself in her studies, in the lost languages and artifacts of ancient civilisations, and she has admired and loved him safely and from a distance, finding her contact with him through the stories in the ancient and tattered books of the Library. She’s furious with him for putting himself at risk by being around her. How can he be here? She isn’t ready yet. 

Then, she feels a cool hand lay itself on top of her clenched fist. It’s as cool as his lips had been against hers in Berlin, lips that gave  way to the surprising warmth of his mouth and his tongue. He wraps his fingers around her and then gradually works her hand open, gently but firmly prising her fingers outwards,  then lays his palm and his fingers flat against hers. Her hand is hot and damp with adrenaline and stress, but his is dry and cooling against her and together their hands find an equilibrium as the seconds tick by. 

 

 

“I know that because you’re you.” He presses his hand firmer and closer to hers, the lines on their palms mirroring each other. She turns back to him, letting herself slip back into the shifting brown-green colours of his iris again. 

“Am I?” There’s no heat or challenge in her voice now, her anger has leached away into the ground leaving only a quivering tension and a taste like ashes in her mouth.

“Yes,” and with that affirmation, his fingers twine into hers, and he shifts slightly so that now their legs are touching, the warm length of her thigh against his cooler one, their clothing the only thing in between them now. “You’re River Song.” 

And with that simple statement,  the tension begins to drain out of her, her blood slows, her muscles unclench. He’s smiling at her again, that young face with such old old eyes that seem to shift and turn as if they have galaxies inside them, the shadows of the willow marking lines across his complicated face. 

“May i show you?” His voice is tentative, unsure, as if seeking permission for something he’s not sure she will like. 

“Show me what?” 

“Show you how i trust you, why i trust you. Show you what i think of you. Inside my mind.” 

“Yes...no. I’m not sure. I don’t know if i’m ready for this...for any of it.” She cannot decide. Pieces of her clash against each other, fear and excitement and horror and want, all stacked together so haphazardly she cannot seem to separate one strand of feeling from another

“Please?” His voice is warm, supplicating. “Close your eyes, River, and i’ll show you.” 

So she does, and in the second that the green world is blocked out by the darkness of her eyelids, another world opens up inside of her. Where her skin touches his, he’s suddenly there, urging, encouraging, pulling her across into him. She rushes into him, like water, and she’s spilling all over the place, spreading out, unable to control herself; but he wraps her, contains her and she feels so.... safe. 

It’s hard to get her bearings in an element she’s never been immersed into before, she feels as if she’s sinking, yet on firm rock, like she’s flowing but still as a deep green well. She looks round her, and in her mind - in his mind - she can perceive doors. From behind one door comes the drift of soft sobs of grief and the bitter taste of endless endless loneliness; behind another of them comes a hum of deep and intense darkness, a feeling of horror that claws at her; from behind another comes the the crackle and clash of a storm, a maelstrom of whirling dense emotion. But then he tugs at her.

Here, he tells her,  next, look here.  He tells her this not with his voice, but with his  voice the unique tone of his insides, rich and true and unmistakably  Doctor . He’s guiding her mind towards a place where a light blazes inside him, and it’s all colours and no colour at all at the same time. But it’s also all one colour, and that colour is the gold that comes when they dying body of a Timelord repairs itself. This light burns as if it’s the heart of a galaxy with the stars clustered too close together, and it burns hard and bright and it frightens her. Surely she we will be consumed inside it, her mind charred away to ash? She tries to pull back, but he’s there with her, urging her, pushing her forwards;  please, River, look,  and the next thing she knows it’s all around her, or else she’s deep inside it....

...It’s the twisting gold from her fingertips and mouth, passing the barrier of her skin and merging into his, becoming the light inside him that twists and repairs his body, cell by cell, as she breathes everything she has into him. It’s glimpses of nights spent together, both of them burning hot under a strip of stars so bright the light is like daylight. It’s kisses in the morning, the taste of both of them on each other’s lips. It’s snatches of them running and fighting and their hearts beating, and all the time under his skin burns the gold of the fire she breathed into him, and she sees how she is woven into every cell of his body now....it was once hers but now it’s his...the echo of her is in his cells. And that echo of her has a name and its name is hers, and its name is love and love and love... 

...and then he’s pulling her upward and then out of it, back into the black space behind her eyes and her hand is gripped tightly to his. She can smell the grass, and that lone bird is still singing out its song in the branches above her. When she finally opens her eyes, she turns to meet his gaze again, her breath coming fast and ragged. 

“Some of what i showed you is...spoilers. Only small ones mind, nothing that could change anything. But do you see, River. Do you see what you are, what you will be? what we are?” His voice is low and earnest, the edge of hope colouring it. And, yes, she does see and she does understand. And it’s that word again, the word that is so important.

“You love me.” 

“Yes.” He smiles at her, squeezing her hand tightly.   

“I love you.” She squeezes back at his hand, flicking her eyes down to where their fingers rest entwined. 

“I know, and that’s why i trust you. Always.” 

“The doors....” 

“My doors. My monsters. We all have monsters inside us, River. The shadows in us are part of who we are. We can’t ever rid ourselves of them fully. We have to carry them with us. But they don’t have to consume us. I wanted you to see that....i’ve done things. Terrible things. But they don’t make me who i am. We always have a choice. Trust yourself.” 

“Trust myself...” she whispers, looking back up at him, and he nods at her, encouraging. And then there’s nothing she can do but lean into him, keeping her eyes open as she watches his flutter close and as her lips meet his. And then she has to close her eyes, because she’s lost completely against the cool of his lips, the startling warmth of his mouth, the heat of his tongue which slides eagerly against hers - and this kiss, this kiss , is different to both the killing and the healing kisses she shared with him in Berlin. This kiss is all the sweet warmth of here and now, his mouth opening onto hers, the smokey taste of him; it is a kiss that’s purely given and shared for its own sake, and the feel of it curls into her, spreading itself through her like light. 

When they finally break away from each other, her hearts are thudding and the kiss rests on her lips as a smile, which he shares back as they look at each other. 

He leans back in to rest his forehead against hers for a moment, his skin a cool balm across her brow. 

“Goodbye River,” he tells her. 

“Goodbye Doctor.” 

And then he’s up and striding away from her, all long limbs and awkward elegance as he pushes aside the green curtain of leaves. He looks back at her, giving her one last smile and a wink, and then he’s gone leaving just her and stillness beneath the tree, and the thud of her hearts beating out after him. 

~ 

 

She carries on with her studies. Both of ancient civilisations and of him. She makes the Library her second home and she trawls through blinking computer catalogue to find the special collections, to find the most ancient and the most obscure books. Books whose pages are so delicate that you have to wear special gloves to handle them, so that the already crumbling pages are not eroded away any further. Inside many of them she discovers that there are writings about times and dreams, lots of stories in which the Doctor tuns up at the most inconvenient moments- or perhaps at the most appropriate moments. The stories trail their way through the history books, and he’s there every time, bringing the chaos – pulling the wool over the eyes of dictator kings, staunching the tears of the poor, sometimes causing havoc. Some books have him down as the court jester, some as the executioner, some as an incubus who steals away the dreams of women at night, filling them with lust and dreams wilder than the sea. River snorts at that particular one, thinking that extremely unlikely.

  
She fills herself up with his stories, and she begins to feel like she knows the measure of the man that she only partly knows in person. 

She acquires a vortex manipulator from a visiting don and she goes travelling, supplementing her research for one of the modules on her degree. Despite all the wide Universe out there, somehow she is always drawn back to the Earth. Maybe it has something to do with being born on an asteroid spinning through space, a thing un-anchored and untethered on a lonely journey through the darkness. Maybe it’s because it’s where she grew up, and she wants to be able to lay claim to a planet, a country as her own. 

~ 

She still has dreams; they do not leave her, and she doesn’t know if they ever will. During the nights in her small room, with its wooden panelled walls,  carved chair and sturdy desk, pieces of her still war with each other as she sleeps. Dilapidated rooms scrawled with red writing, paint dripping like blood; trees whose leaves are like worked silver; a man on the edge of the Universe; guns in her aching arms firing again and again; screams echoing from long corridors; the sweetness of Amelia’s smile...mother; a blue diary and a ribbon.... 

Sometimes she wakes screaming, her legs twisted into the sheets, sometimes she wakes smiling, the sun slanting onto her face, broken into ripples and waves by the faux-ancient warped glass of her bedroom windows. 

But the bad dreams don’t consume her any more, she wakes smiling more than she wakes screaming now. And when the dawn finally breaks over her, she steps out into the light and cradles the restless part of her that is Melody closer to her than she ever dared before. 

~ 

 

When he next comes to visit her, she is ready.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
